Most Hated Weblogisms

June 21st, 2007

TechnologyNice, light article for a Thursday morning. Basically it’s the results of a poll revealing the most hated Internet words - ones that are made up to explain some fuzzy new media concept.

  1. Folksonomy. Adding meaning through tags. This only bugs me because anybody who would use “folksonomy” when you could just say “tags” means they’re full of themselves.
  2. Blogosphere. Well, that sucks for me since I use that world a great deal. Do you really want to hurt me?
  3. Blog. Everyone hates us.
  4. Netiquette. I still find this term annoying. I think of some Miss Manners type wagging a finger while the uncontrollable herd of cats that is the Internet gives the finger back. You cannot control teh Internets!
  5. Blook. A book based on a blog. Since I never heard of this term before, it bugs the crap out of me.
  6. Cookie. This has become such a technical term it doesn’t bug me any more. As soon as a term appears in a dialog box it’s no longer slang.
  7. Wiki. Who knew? Same with cookie; it’s a standard term.

Also mentioned are me-media - I guess this is a replacement for the more un wieldy “user-created content” being done on social networking websites. When you first hear any of these terms, it’s annoying. But like much slang, the more you see it used, the less annoying it gets. The second annoyance is how a lot of them are combinations of words or an attempt to create a pun, which ends up being truly annoying (”blook” as a combination of “blog” and “book”). But “blog” was a shortening of “web log” and now that it appears regularly in Newsweek and the like, the annoying novelty / pun has worn off for me.

For more wacky Internet terms, check out my weblogisms page.

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  • A few of my personal favorites (admittedly some of these go beyond being purely 'weblogisms' and are more 'internetsisms')

    n00b : I dunno, I just think it's awesome. It packs so much meaning and has a fantastic combination of letters and numbers

    "interwebs" : Again, like "the internets" I love the casual, backwater feel of the term. Truly awesome

    meh : This one bugs me. Though I admittedly use it. I find it rude cuz it so effectively conveys malaise, boredom and a lack of interest so concisely into 3 letters. Meh.

    teh : I love this one. Simple transposition of two letters and "the" is reinvented as something mispelled and somehow hilarious.

    web 2.0 : I'm tired of this term. It tells you everything and nothing at the same time. The media/blogosphere harps on its overuse, but perpetuates that very overuse. Can we just put it to rest?

    Re: your list, I agree that netiquette is an annoying word. I'm not against polite web interaction, but the word is grating.

    One final term that's already getting old for me is Facebook's executives' who've been bandying about the term "social graph". I dunno why it bugs me, I'm not even sure what it completely means (wikipedia gives it a go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph) but I guess I don't want to see all my relationships and interactions reduced to some "graph".
  • heh... n00b is rather amusing although I prefer the "newbie" term.

    About Web 2.0 - I was considering eliminating it as a category from this very blog as it pretty much overlaps entirely with the Technology category. My site map is still too unwieldy.

    Never heard of "social graph" - I gotta invest some time in checking out facebook!
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